If global politics had left you in any doubt, the commotion caused by Mark Wahlberg last week was proof that we are truly in the age of the strongman. The publication of the actor’s daily routine – which includes two gym sessions, six meals and one hour cultivating his torso in a cryogenic recovery chamber – confirmed what many of us had suspected for some time: a man’s cultural worth these days can be accurately gauged by the circumference of his biceps.

Telltale evidence had already arrived last year, when the eighth film in the Fast and Furious series shattered the global box-office record for an opening weekend, taking an absurd half a billion dollars in three days. That would be the Fast and Furious series fronted by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Vin Diesel, two men whose pre-Hollywood years were spent as pro wrestler and nightclub bouncer respectively, and whose current whey-powered incarnations make pipsqueaks of their former selves.

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Together, this trinity of weights-room warriors have racked up nearly $10bn worth of ticket sales in the US alone. If you were feeling unsure about a society that chooses a showbiz star as its president, how about one whose cultural icons look more like cartoon characters than people? Strange times indeed – made even stranger by the fact that we’ve been here before.

Back in the 80s, as former film star President Ronald Reagan was decrying the Soviets as an “evil empire”, cinema screens were similarly teeming with inflated male flesh. Within a year of Reagan’s election, Sylvester Stallone had made his first appearance as the machete-wielding John Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger had made the transition from body builder to action star with Conan the Barbarian. By the time the credits rolled on Reagan’s presidency in 1989, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren had piled aboard an increasingly cramped bandwagon and between them, the four had rattled out two dozen or so movies about vengeful vigilantes (Rambos I-III), killer robots (The Terminator) and wannabe arm-wrestling champions (Over the Top).

If the 70s’ action icons were Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Charles Bronson – hard-drinking, normal-looking guys whose morals were strewn with shades of grey – the following decade flipped the formula: you may have rightly wondered how Arnie and co got so pumped, but you never had reason to question their cause. And they were well-oiled in only the most literal sense.

A cursory scan of some video-box taglines from the era (samples include “Crime is a disease. Meet the cure” and “Heroes never die. They just reload”) give a basic impression of the level of nuance on offer. Generally speaking, these movies opted for the profane over the profound. In an age when American individualism reigned supreme, these were straightforward stories of one man saving the day. And “man” is the operative word – it was the actors’ hulking physiques, torsos bared at every turn, that were the stars of the show. These films might have drooled over firearms, but not half as much as they drooled over human arms.

Fast-forward three decades, asagun-toting Wahlberg looms over us from roadside billboards, and it’s tempting to conclude that we’ve come full circle. Why the renewed urge to thrust these oversized muscle-men on to our screens? It’s almost as if America is trying to make up for something. After all, the goliaths of the 80s were largely there to prove a point in the wake of Vietnam: Rambo, Commando, Predator and the rest all delivered thinly veiled restagings of what had been a disastrous war, only this time America’s cigar-chomping heroes emerged from the jungle triumphant.

There are no wars to refight these days, but that’s not to say Uncle Sam doesn’t still harbour an inferiority complex or two. Perhaps in an era of waning US economic clout – and vanishing political dignity, thanks to you-know-who – Wahlberg and co are here to compensate. To make America pump weights again.

Or perhaps that’s too easy a reading. Because it’s not quite right to label the current crop of strongmen as spiritual heirs to their 80s predecessors: while Schwarzenegger and Stallone were all about the bloodshed and bravado, these guys tend to deliver their heroism with a nod and a wink, even a hug. The screen personas honed by Diesel and Johnson in particular are deliberately goofy and warm-hearted (if there’s one thing the Fast and Furious films adore more than a city-decimating street-race, it’s an earnest heart-to-heart over a couple of cold Coronas), although that probably says less about the current zeitgeist than the scramble for mass appeal that has taken over Marvel-era Hollywood. They just don’t exterminate ’em like they used to.

Not often, anyway. Wahlberg’s series of save-the-day tales made with Peter Berg are perhaps the closest in spirit to the alpha-dog adventures of the 80s. Mile 22 is the latest of these and you sense that the film, whose plot follows an elite paramilitary task force escorting a shady south Asian operative back to US soil, will have Stallone and co nodding approvingly, trigger-fingers stiffening with excitement.

Either way, we can safely say that America’s appetite for these herculean heroes endures. Which counts as mission accomplished for the men of yesteryear, whose simple ambitions were laid out by John Rambo all the way back in 1985: “All I want is for our country to love us as much as we love it! That’s all I want!”